Re: Examining individual bytes of an integer

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message 
news:pq6qp0$1nbs$1@gioia.aioe.org...
> On 2018-10-17 00:35, Randy Brukardt wrote:
>> "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
>> news:pq4jjh$5ig$1@gioia.aioe.org...
>>> On 2018-10-16 12:18, AdaMagica wrote:
>>>
>>>> OK, I stay corrected. But I still claim that it would be extremely 
>>>> unfair
>>>> of a compiler not to follow this advice (A'Address = A 
>>>> (A'First)'Address
>>>> with increasing addresses for further components).
>>>
>>> It is a real pain when writing storage pools that must do some 
>>> bookkeeping
>>> around allocated objects. There should really be X'Allocation_Address
>>> there in addition.
>>
>> Meaning what?
>
> Meaning the first address of the object, e.g. of the dope of an indefinite 
> array as it was returned by the allocator:
>
>    Allocation_Address := Pointer_To_Object.all'Address - Offset;
>
> Presently the offset to the object beginning must be estimated during 
> run-time.

I see. Janus/Ada allocates descriptors separately from the rest of the 
object (there will be two calls to Allocate in such a case), and the 
descriptor contains a pointer at the data. We did that in large part because 
it's necessary to support slice actuals: in that case, the bounds and data 
location can be different than those for the original object. (And we didn't 
want a lot of different representations, it's hard enough when there are 
just a handful.)

> Another, probably more ugly method is create a fake storage pool with 
> Deallocate storing its address argument without doing actual deallocation. 
> The object's access type is cast to the fake-pool-specific access type. 
> Unchecked_Deallocation called. The stored value is the true address.

Yuk. This is why 'Address returns the descriptor in Janus/Ada. You can 
always get to the data with indexing.

                                    Randy.